CHAPTER XIV: HOUSE-MOVING
I have heard Mrs. Beehive say of one of our most prosperous neighbours that they had “struggled up from the Palmerston Road.” They were certainly a little battered and jaded when they got there: “there” being a handsome residential mansion on the edge of the Park. It has a tennis lawn, a vegetable garden, a garage, four entertaining rooms, ten bedrooms, butler’s pantry, electric light, ground-floor kitchens, and every modern convenience—altogether about as much material for annoyance and waste of time as can well be imagined. By the time Tom was sixteen and Anne fourteen, our doom was drawing near. In spite of my resistance, James and I were about to struggle up from the Palmerston Road; I saw it coming. Our pleasant little house was falling to bits over our heads. We were eight where wehad been but four, and (this settled it) Ruth was getting angry. She wanted help in the kitchen, and there was nowhere to put any help at night. James, too, was bothered by the gramophone; Tom and Anne wanted a tennis lawn; nurse wanted a room where the dressmaker could sew (she made the nursery floor so bitty). Nurse even spoke of the bandboxes containing the winter hats as if they had recently broken out like a plague. When every one had displayed their grievances, I remembered that I wanted another room myself in which to escape from them—the aggrieved parties—a question-proof room if possible with only one door. I had thought of an underground suite of apartments like that of the Duke of Portland, with a glass roof. It would have been such a pleasure to watch the numerous legs of my tormentors as they ran about looking for me. I told the efficient female that we thought of moving, and she said: “Ah, I knew you would have to sooner or later.” I assured her that it was quite undecided,and that if we did move it would be into a smaller house. The odious creature smiled falsely, and said, of course that was the ideal life. They themselves never knew what peace was until they moved into a small house, and one really well-trained servant could run everything for eight people quite easily. That is all very well for her. She has given up making ices in boots and omelettes in hats, and now eats nothing but nuts. She is so vilely efficient that she secured from her harassed Maker the only sample he had of a patient husband who can and will digest anything. She kept the pattern and made a little outfit of children of the same convenient kind. Then, I suppose, no more were stocked, as, on the whole, there is no great demand for docile nut-eating men. They do not provide enough incident for the average household.
When James was thoroughly fired with the struggling-up idea, he set his mind towards the topmost pinnacle of ambition. A house near the Park was not enough forhim, we must move into the country. “Where does the country end and the county begin?” I asked. “The county, I understand, is the thing to aim at.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I always thought it was the whole caboodle, town and country and all.”
“But, then, where do the county families come from?” I asked.
“The large provincial towns, I believe,” James replied without looking up from his book.
“Can you live right in town and be a county family?” (Silence.)
“What county families do we know?”
“Oh, the Higginbottams and the Crackers and the Fitzmullets—do go away.”
“But they all live in the town except the Fitzmullets, who are seven miles from a railway station.”
“If you don’t go away at once,” said James, “I will see that the whole county, wherever we are, calls on you, and you will die of a slow, insidious poison. They willpoison your mind and your dress and your language. Do you see?”
I left the subject then. We shall come back to it later, because the struggling up of a species from one vantage-point to another is a fascinating study for those who love Nature, and I have not half got to the bottom of this county business yet; it is so involved. In the meantime there was the move itself.
Of all the experiences most calculated to humble the mighty a house move is the most humiliating. One’s household possessions lose all reticence, decency and moral sense. They flaunt themselves and cry aloud to the passers-by for attention. They behave more like Neapolitan beggars than anything else—maimed beggars on the spree. I have seen antics performed by my own furniture that made me long to burn down every city of the Empire and be numbered amongst the beasts of the field. An undertaker’s work seems wholesome and cheerful compared to that of the furniture-remover.He gets an ingrained sense of squalor that corrupts his senses and his memory until ugliness is to him not only inevitable but appropriate. I met the foreman packer staggering up our garden path with a wardrobe on his head. In one hand he flourished a picture (with the glass broken) representing the Duke of Wellington standing with drawn sword on the top of a mountain; in the other a fire-screen that was once intended for a jumble sale, but had been mislaid for years behind the plate-chest.
“For the drawing-room, I suppose,” he observed, and passed on. I ran after him, protesting that both were marked “not to go”; but when I reached the house I found them in the middle of the drawing-room floor with seven unspeakable cushions marked “cook’s bedroom,” a warming-pan (unearthed from heaven knows where), James’s large and particularly ugly writing-table, and the dining-room carpet neatly tacked down.
The efficient female tells me it is the easiest thing in the world to move. Youjust mark everything with the number of the room where it is to go. But she forgets that a wombat with its brain amputated could tell at a glance to which room her things belong, and she takes everything with her. There is a place for every horror and every horror is in its place. The hat-rack, the dining-room chairs and curtains, the assorted oddments for the spare bedroom, and the only comfortable furniture (rather specially dusty velvet with bob fringe) for the smoking-room. You cannot even mistake the pictures, for all those belonging to the drawing-room are water-colours with yellow frames, the dining-room has the “portraits in oils,” those for the bedrooms are photogravures representing the emotions (and it does not matter how they are distributed), historical pictures go in the passage, the agricultural and sporting in the smoking-room, and in the bathroom go the family groups and churches. So the foreman easily makes a nice job of it. It is a painful experience to find how easily some one elsecan fit us with a suit of circumstances which do not belong to us, just by expecting them to be ours. They pop a whole environment to which they are accustomed over our heads and button it round the neck before we have time to escape. It took me a whole week to free myself from a certain Mrs. Simpson, into whose form I was buttoned by the foreman packer with his preconceived notion of what a lady moving house ought to be like. He had such firm faith in Mrs. Simpson, and expected so confidently to find her in my house, that his faith removed the mountain of my individuality, and I became his ideal. His mind was so steeped in Mrs. Simpson, he was so incapable of recognising the existence of any married woman but Mrs. Simpson, that he was obliged to fish Mrs. Simpson out of his pocket and clap her over my head before he could adjust his mind to understand what I wanted. When he first came to see me about the arrangements, he looked me up and down and metaphorically said: “Excuse me, I will just fetch Mrs.Simpson, and then we shall know where we are.” As he fixed me with his eye, I felt myself becoming like the lady in an advertisement for tea. I could feel the chocolate-like richness of the fluid I should pour out for my lace-begarbed friends who sat amiably smiling round the mixed biscuits and the cruet. I knew that I had on a speckled blouse with a wired collar, and a short tweed skirt, and that I looked just thirty-seven, and was extremely sensible and good-natured. My own house that I loved so much disappeared under the petrifying expectation of that foreman, and at the sight of his notebook there sprang up dishevelled pink paper lamp-shades, photograph frames in the form of banjos and sunflowers, rickety overmantels, and everything that Mrs. Simpson always had. All Mrs. Simpson’s past surged into my veins. I remembered how I had gone with Mr. Simpson (who was rather a darling in those days) to buy our furniture, and how I, sighing after a heavy day amongst the suites, had said: “I think we have doneeverything now except the ornaments for the drawing-room mantelpiece.”
“Yes,” I said dreamily to the foreman, “everything is to go please—the drawing-room ornaments—and the overmantel—and the cosy corner—and the what-not.”
“I beg pardon, m’m,” he interrupted, “they’ll be in the drawing-room, I suppose. I don’t see what you’re describing here.”
“I am sorry,” said I. “It was your friend, Mrs. Simpson, who put me out for the moment.”
“I think there must be some slight mistake, m’m,” he said, “I don’t seem to remember a Mrs. Simpson.”
“No, no,” I answered, making a great effort to possess myself again, “of course there is no such person; I know that. But now we really must get on.”
“You leave everything to me, mum,” he assured me, “and we’ll move everything, just as it is now.”
“But, please,” I begged, “I don’t want everything moved. You know I said thata few minutes ago. There is a lot of rubbish in the house that is not to go at all. You will be very careful, won’t you, not to take what is marked “not to go”?
He promised, with tears of enthusiasm in his eyes, and he took everything, without exception. I found an old potato, that Ruth had left in the sink, sprouting under the spare room bed a fortnight after we moved in; it had a large white label round its neck with “not to go” printed on it. I was so worked up by this discovery that I wrote to the foreman about it, and he replied that he was very sorry; it had been a misunderstanding. He understood that No. 2 bedroom was the servants’ apartment, it seemed so bare.
I had really had a good dose of Mrs. Simpson before the foreman assaulted me with her. She was a great friend of the house-agent. He had acted for her for years, and I had a sickening day in her shape when we were looking for houses. The first agent I went to brought her with him to the doorof a residential mansion he wished to dispose of. He attired me in her garments while we were waiting for the caretaker.
“I expect you manage to get your own way pretty well in the matter of decorations, don’t you?” he began. “I notice the ladies generally do.”
I became Mrs. Simpson at once. “Oh yes,” I said, “my husband is much too busy to take notice of these things. It wouldn’t do to trouble the gentlemen with them, would it?” Then I threw Mrs. Simpson to the ground and trampled on her.
“I am sorry, I don’t like this house,” I said quite firmly, but he took no notice and told me to wait till I had seen round a bit. That revived her. When Mrs. Simpson is at her worst I see advertisements in the way I am told drunken men see spiders. I became Mrs. Simpson in an advertisement for somebody’s lemonade. I ran about over a tennis lawn; young men with Arrow collars and Viyella shirts lay on the grass beside a picnic basket; some one else, in a punt, poured out anew brand of lime-juice cordial. There was a high wall round our garden, and up the wall crept monstrous roses grown under the influence of pills for plants. My grandfather was there too in a smoking-cap, rolling the lawn with a special kind of roller.
“Look here,” I said, “I am so sorry, but I cannot bear this. I don’t like the shape of the lady who lived here.”
“What do you mean?” asked the agent, looking at me over some horrid eyeglasses (I think they were some new patent ones that boasted of being practically indistinguishable from the real eye). “It was an old gentleman that lived here with three daughters. Who told you there was a lady?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I persisted. “An old man with daughters is just as bad—I mean, I don’t think the house is healthy. If you will send me your list I will go round by myself.” I went to three or four other agents until at last I found one who did not know Mrs. Simpson, and I took the firsthouse he offered me. Coleridge, or some one of that sort, had lived there, but he had been ousted by some rich Americans who are so volatile that they do not stick like the Mrs. Simpsons, so I very soon had the place to myself. When we go I shall scrape the walls and remove all the fittings and the tragic little bits of linoleum and empty bottles. The deadest mutton is never so dead as objects that have been called into temporary life by human ownership. I would rather find fifteen naked corpses in a house than one old pair of trousers. I should like to take that house agent to Pompeii and show him the petrified bodies and their belongings and ask him which made his flesh creep most. It might make him abandon his gruesome trade and be the end of Mrs. Simpson. But if there were no houses to let, where would all the poor ladies of England lay their eggs? It is not practicable.